Understanding practitioner professionalism in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health: lessons from student and registrar placements at an urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary health care service

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples continue to be pathologised in medical curriculum, leaving graduates feeling unequipped to effectively work cross-culturally. These factors create barriers to culturally safe health care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In this pilot pre-post study, we followed the learning experiences of 7 medical students and 4 medical registrars undertaking clinical placements at an urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary health care service in 2014. Through analysis and comparison of pre- and post-placement responses to a paper-based case study of a fictitious Aboriginal patient, we identified four learning principles for medical professionalism: student exposure to nuanced, complex and positive representations of Aboriginal peoples; positive practitioner role modelling; interpersonal skills that build trust and minimise patient-practitioner relational power imbalances; and, knowledge, understanding and skills for providing patient centred, holistic care. Though not exhaustive, these principles can increase the capacity of practitioners to foster culturally safe and optimal health care for Aboriginal peoples. Furthermore, competence and effectiveness in Aboriginal health contexts is an essential component of medical professionalism

BFKL versus HERA

The BFKL equation and the kT-factorization theorem are used to obtain predictions for F2 in the small Bjorken-x region over a wide range of Q**2. The dependence on the parameters, especially on those concerning the infrared region, is discussed. After a background fit to recent experimental data obtained at HERA and at Fermilab (E665 experiment), we find that the predicted, almost Q**2 independent BFKL slope lambda >= 0.5 appears to be too steep at lower Q**2 values. Thus there seems to be a chance that future HERA data can distinguish between pure BFKL and conventional field theoretic renormalization group approaches.Comment: 26 pages, 6 eps figures, LaTeX2e using epsfig.sty and amssymb.st

QCD Predictions for the Transverse Energy Flow in Deep-Inelastic Scattering in the Small x HERA Regime

The distribution of transverse energy, $E_T$, which accompanies deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering at small $x$, is predicted in the central region away from the current jet and proton remnants. We use BFKL dynamics, which arises from the summation of multiple gluon emissions at small $x$, to derive an analytic expression for the $E_T$ flow. One interesting feature is an $x^{-\epsilon}$ increase of the $E_T$ distribution with decreasing $x$, where $\epsilon = (3\alpha_s/\pi)2\log 2$. We perform a numerical study to examine the possibility of using characteristics of the $E_T$ distribution as a means of identifying BFKL dynamics at HERA.Comment: 16 pages, REVTEX 3.0, no figures. (Hardcopies of figures available on request from Professor A.D. Martin, Department of Physics, University of Durham, DH1 3LE, England.) Durham preprint : DTP/94/0

Links between soil microbial communities and plant traits in a species-rich grassland under long-term climate change

Climate change can influence soil microorganisms directly by altering their growth and activity but also indirectly via effects on the vegetation, which modifies the availability of resources. Direct impacts of climate change on soil microorganisms can occur rapidly, whereas indirect effects mediated by shifts in plant community composition are not immediately apparent and likely to increase over time. We used molecular fingerprinting of bacterial and fungal communities in the soil to investigate the effects of 17 years of temperature and rainfall manipulations in a species‐rich grassland near Buxton, UK. We compared shifts in microbial community structure to changes in plant species composition and key plant traits across 78 microsites within plots subjected to winter heating, rainfall supplementation, or summer drought. We observed marked shifts in soil fungal and bacterial community structure in response to chronic summer drought. Importantly, although dominant microbial taxa were largely unaffected by drought, there were substantial changes in the abundances of subordinate fungal and bacterial taxa. In contrast to short‐term studies that report high resistance of soil fungi to drought, we observed substantial losses of fungal taxa in the summer drought treatments. There was moderate concordance between soil microbial communities and plant species composition within microsites. Vector fitting of community‐weighted mean plant traits to ordinations of soil bacterial and fungal communities showed that shifts in soil microbial community structure were related to plant traits representing the quality of resources available to soil microorganisms: the construction cost of leaf material, foliar carbon‐to‐nitrogen ratios, and leaf dry matter content. Thus, our study provides evidence that climate change could affect soil microbial communities indirectly via changes in plant inputs and highlights the importance of considering long‐term climate change effects, especially in nutrient‐poor systems with slow‐growing vegetation

Constraints on gluon evolution at small x

The BFKL and the unified angular-ordered equations are solved to determine the gluon distribution at small $x$. The impact of kinematic constraints is investigated. Predictions are made for observables sensitive to the gluon at small $x$. In particular comparison is made with measurements at the HERA electron-proton collider of the proton structure function $F_2 (x, Q^2)$ as a function of $\ln Q^2$, the charm component, $F_2^c(x,Q^2)$ and diffractive $J/\psi$ photoproduction.Comment: 17 LaTeX pages and 9 postscript figure

The description of F2 at small x incorporating angular ordering

We study the perturbative QCD description of the HERA measurements of $F_2 (x, Q^2)$ using a gluon distribution that is obtained from an evolution incorporating angular ordering of the gluon emissions, and which embodies both GLAP and BFKL dynamics. We compare the predictions with recent HERA data for $F_2$. We present estimates of the charm component $F_2^c (x, Q^2)$ and of $F_L (x, Q^2)$.Comment: 8 LaTeX pages + 4 uuencoded figure

A unified BFKL and GLAP description of F2F_2 data

We argue that the use of the universal unintegrated gluon distribution and the $k_T$ (or high energy) factorization theorem provides the natural framework for describing observables at small x. We introduce a coupled pair of evolution equations for the unintegrated gluon distribution and the sea quark distribution which incorporate both the resummed leading $ln (1/x)$ BFKL contributions and the resummed leading $ln (Q^2)$ GLAP contributions. We solve these unified equations in the perturbative QCD domain using simple parametic forms of the nonperturbative part of the integrated distributions. With only two (physically motivated) input parameters we find that this $k_T$ factorization approach gives an excellent description of the measurements of $F_2 (x,Q^2)$ at HERA. In this way the unified evolution equations allow us to determine the gluon and sea quark distributions and, moreover, to see the x domain where the resummed $ln (1/x)$ effects become significant. We use $k_T$ factorization to predict the longitudinal structure function $F_L (x,Q^2)$ and the charm component of $F_2 (x,Q^2)$.Comment: 25 pages, LaTeX, 9 figure

Properties of the BFKL equation and structure function predictions for HERA

The general properties of the Lipatov or BFKL equation are reviewed. Modifications to the infrared region are proposed. Numerical predictions for the deep-inelastic electron-proton structure functions at small $x$ are presented and confronted with recent HERA measurements.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, Latex file, Durham preprint DTP 92/2

THE GLUON DISTRIBUTION AT SMALL x OBTAINED FROM A UNIFIED EVOLUTION EQUATION.

We solve a unified integral equation to obtain the $x, Q_T$ and $Q$ dependence of the gluon distribution of a proton in the small $x$ regime; where $x$ and $Q_T$ are the longitudinal momentum fraction and the transverse momentum of the gluon probed at a scale $Q$. The equation generates a gluon with a steep $x^{- \lambda}$ behaviour, with $\lambda \sim 0.5$, and a $Q_T$ distribution which broadens as $x$ decreases. We compare our solutions with, on the one hand, those that we obtain using the double-leading-logarithm approximation to Altarelli-Parisi evolution and, on the other hand, to those that we determine from the BFKL equation.Comment: LaTeX file with 10 postscript figures (uuencoded